Struwwelpeter-Screwpine

Extract from my real-time review HERE.



From “The one notable exception” to “Even the ones you supposedly loved.”
“…playing out your endless power games, that you managed to trample everyone else.”
This is one Hell of a book. Teasing me just as vigorously as I am teasing it. Or teasing him, that Lewis bloke playing the ‘endless power games’. Now incrementally an authority figure (following a Mayoral election plotted in the Chestnut Garden (cf David Cameron’s Rose Garden appearance with Nick Clegg), an election, no doubt, similar to the very strange Mayoral election going on at this very moment between Ken Livingstone & Boris Johnson in an increasingly Olymp-mythic London), not black and/or white (literally as well as figuratively), allowing us to be embroiled in creating Paul Dent the new Winston Smith: who is in fact, obversely, creating us in return? Lewis and Paul: symbiotic? But who the host and who the parasite in such a (mis-)synergy? And a Revolution: an essential miscegenate Revolution from the ultimate role-playing about the American Civil War in artistic Struwwelpeter-Screwpine retrospect for which only reading the previous Hirshberg books that I’ve recently experienced for the first time can fully prepare you. All of this, for me, ties in very well with things in my long on-going philosophy (things, as a Hawler, I’ve often droned on about on-line for many years) about ‘Fiction as Religion’ and ‘”Magic Fiction” as opposed to Magic Realism’ and the ‘Synchronised Shards of Random Truth and Fiction’, and ‘Hawling’ (cf the pulley depot in the Bunk book earlier) and 'Nemonymity' etc etc (please google these terms, if you wish.) This is a major event for me, my reading this book. As it will be for you, I hope, even without the need for you to philosophise about its Creative Aesthetics! It is a SF Fantasy masquerading as a Literary Masterpiece of an Alternate World skewed Mainstream in turn masquerading as Zola-esque Naturalism as if written by Scott Fitzgerald! But we’re not finished yet. Things could still change. (7 Apr 12 – 9.40 am bst)

The Global Real-Time Reviewing Project

Extract from my real-time review of 'The Book of Bunk' by Glen Hirshberg HERE.
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From “I don’t know the beginning” to “‘Nothing here is really yours.’”

“‘So I just decided you might ought to put this place in your tourbook. Even if it’s not really a place anymore. Just in case one day … I don’t know.’”

And at Screwpine we reach some major plot hub that is susceptible, no doubt, to despoiling-by-review. Which I don’t intend to do. Suffice to say that, although I have been on various audit-trails with my Hirshberg reading-orgy of the last few weeks, I think I have reached a goal that somehow I knew I would reach: “‘A real Reconstruction.’” Not a parallel world. Not a Paul Dent, our protagonist, as Winston Smith, not even as a Big Brother manqué or some Wizard of Oz behind the controls, but certainly as a force even more powerful perhaps than the Lewis figure who dogs him. This Screwpine ‘hub’ and its ‘story’ seems to be a stunning geomantic vision that effectively stems from all the ‘points’ and inter-connections that each reader should discover for him- or herself heretofore, i.e. a different set of such spokes of the millwell-wheel for each reader, but always reaching some significant hub where we all arrive eventually in some Lost-type base with contraptions to tweak and dormitories of bunk-beds. And the possible arrival of a ‘Key’ writing-figure as an even bigger catalyst than any of us? The only way, perhaps, indeed, to review or simply discuss this ”Book of Bunk” is by some method of real-time mini-reviews written and imparted whenever we ‘choose’ breaks for sectioning or triangulating the text by the ‘Godgiven’ foibles and accidents of life and by the time-spans available for our creative reading amid all those other pressures of existence. We all do this naturally when reading any book but do we then cohere the cumulative piecemeal reactions that we find ourselves feeling? Do we aim for a single sweeping review after we’ve finished the book or for something far more special that only special books can summon or instil in us even beyond our own perceived ability to achieve? I hereby inaugurate, at this junction of the tracks, the Global Real-Time Reviewing Project. More of this later. Meanwhile, of course, I may not have reached this book’s ‘hub’ at all, having so far only read about 60% of the text. I do wish ebooks had page numbers! (6 Apr 12 – 4.35 pm bst)

The Call of the Silly

‘zeroism, egnisomicon, egnisism’ in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1967), ‘whofage’ in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1973), ‘agra aska’ (1983), ‘weirdmonger’ (1988), use of ‘brainwright’ in modern times (1990), Salustrade (1992) use of ‘yesterfang’ in modern times (1997), ‘wordhunger’ (1999), ‘nemonymous, ‘nemonymity’, late-labelling, veils-&-piques’ (2001), ‘denemonise’ (2002), ‘megazanthus’, ‘weirdonymous’, ‘chasing the noumenon’ (2003), ‘wordonymous’, ‘wordominous’, ‘the-ominous-imagination’, revelling in vulnerability (2004), ‘a woven fire-wall of words’, ‘the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’, ‘nemoguity’, ‘vexed texture of text’, ‘fictipathy’, ‘nemotion’, ‘the hawler’, ‘the angel megazanthus’, ‘klaxon city’, ‘horrorism’ when used as a word for the philosophy of horror fiction (2005), ‘publication-on-reading’, ‘antipodal angst’, ‘the tenacity of feathers’, ‘a writer’s mandala’, ‘wordy weird’, ‘nemophilia / nemophobia’, ‘magic fiction’ as the obverse of the more common expression ‘magic realism’, ‘weirdtongue’ as the ‘name’ of a language, ‘Glistenberry’ as an alternative name for ‘Glastonbury’, ‘tonguage’ as a ‘conscious’ language, ‘yester-eggs’ as a term for Proustian ‘selves’, ‘the parthenogenesis of reality from artifice’, ‘all is for the pest in the pest of all worlds’, ‘Baffles’ as fables with muffled morals (2006), ‘fanblade fable’, ‘abutting the if’, ‘word clones / word clowns’, ‘bumps for books’, ‘rite of review’, ‘cone zero’, ‘a basket of coinages’ (2007), ‘small press cover ark(ive), the baser pulps’ ‘orrorfaces’, ‘the wheel culture’, ‘netogenic’, the first fiction about a ‘drogulus’, ‘Innerskull’, ‘meganthus‘ (2008), ‘CERN Zoo’ in literature, ‘Real-Time Reviewing‘, ‘ligottum‘, ‘the pit and the pessimum‘, ‘ligottus‘, ‘fubbcuckle’, ‘extraneity creep’, ‘pillowghost’, ‘intowards’, ‘powderghost’, ‘nightmare’s moat’ (2009), ‘THE TENSES’, ‘scream munch’ as another word for ‘captcha’, ‘skight’ – threepenny bit, ‘invitations from within’, ‘novellatory’, ’Ress’, ‘Venn Dreams’, ‘Tearsheet Doll’, scanbuncle, A Götterdämmerung of Guts , Holistic Horror (2010), SFtopia, Salustraders / Overspacers, Novellarette, Inquel, Gaddafery, Jungian autonymity, sudracide, an impesto novel, trendbaffler, our planet as reliquary, fictionatronics, Lovecraftianisation, “To know the worst is also to know the best“, vignellarette, “Nothing is controlled by logic other than logic itself.”, nightgators, Horror Genreators, dicksplay, roman littoral, ghostalt, poltergeistalt, horrasy, Horrasy: The Horrastic and the Heuristic, srednibution, srednidipity, Lovecraftian indescriptivities, bememorise, alephantiasis, reva-menders, metapomorphic, rarifiction, neoloquism, Was the God Particle born instable? (2011), angelivalent, literal-meaning dreaming, the ‘Higgs boson’ of Horror, The Weirdonomicon, Aickmania, shortcomings harnessed are stronger than strengths unused, privacy-trawler, disarming strangeness in connection with Robert Aickman, Fiction is like currency: belief is everything, oblique concomitant / oblique contaminant, age at the edge, A writer should make clouds shine even if the world’s sun has gone, The Call of the Silly. (2012).

The Sculthorpe Earth-Cry

Interesting take by one of my favourite writers – Christopher Priest – on the Clarke Award short list. (My novel ‘Nemonymous Night’ was on the original list of sixty): http://www.christopher-priest.co.uk/journal/1077/hull-0-scunthorpe-3/

Thinking about it further on a personal level: I’d be happy with any resultant shortlist if I thought all those creating the shortlist had read thoroughly the sixty novels on the original long list. Mr Priest, too, when criticising the short list.
As to ‘Nemonymous Night’ – this is Jules Vernian-SF – and I’d be happy if it had several fair but bad reviews. Then I’d know where it stood. No fault of anyone, but it has only had a few reviews: (linked from here: http://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/reviews/ for reference), the first being a 5 star Amazon review from a respected Amazon reviewer. One of the others was tentative at worst, the other three fairly enthusiastic at best.
But very few people seem to have actually read it. I hope I’m not tempting fate, but, with this comment, I hereby encourage into the public domain all those fair but bad reviews harbouring in readers’ or critics’ hearts, rather than just a handful of fairly good reviews it has received so far.
Revie(w)’s Leeds United 0 Colchester United 4.
Meanwhile, I admire Priest’s Hull/Scunthorpe article. I know he didn’t write it for this reason; but his work is a league above all of us.
My own take on his ‘The Islanders’ last September:
http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/the-lslanders-by-christopher-priest/

‘Admiration’ at the overall article is however not the same as agreement with the caricatural mini-reviews embodied in the article.

Earth Cry (Sculthorpe):

I Am Coming To Live in Your Mouth

Extract from my real-time review of a Glen Hirshberg book HERE.
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I Am Coming To Live in Your Mouth

“We’ve been coming here a month. I’ve never seen anyone fight like you do.”

An enormously powerful treatment of terminal illness, as Kagome and others care for Joe who has for many years been riding the hoped-for remissions towards an inevitable riddling death: a sense of crossword and other word puzzles or computer games as part of the tumours’ horrendous ’riddling’ of his body, too, perhaps. I don’t want to give the impression however that this story is not an entirely serious nocturne of pain, despite there being, just as one example, a retrocausal form of the ’Constantinople/ It’ joke together with the weaknesses of the carers (Joe’s wife Kagome, mother, cat, Hospice workers who visit and friend Ryan (and his strangely apt connection with playing a”ukulele” and as a useful Scrabble word)) – their weaknesses and strengths. “But why did Americans always focus on the death part? What else did they imagine angels were for?” And the central image of fighting back against cancer is here portrayed as a ghost or role-play character of haunting shuddering strength… we are never sure, and I’m not going to spoil things by trying to make things clearer in this ‘review’. Suffice to say, this is yet another Hirshberg fiction that has affected me deeply. Truly deeply. And Kagome: OK, Game? We’re never sure how far we can go in such circumstances. Or let go. “…then froze as the START NEW GAME? message appeared.” (25 Mar 12 (today being my father’s birthday – who died of MND in 2007 after a long battle): 10.55 am BST, i.e. now no longer GMT)

Sangria in the Sangraal

I shall go out on a limb: I have read much Rhys Hughes fiction since the early 1990s and, despite most of it, if not all, being brilliant stuff, I genuinely believe the SANGRIA IN THE SANGRAAL book to be the best organically thought-provoking and mind-expanding whole. Fabulous with brazen wit and sparkle: also implicitly gentle and meditative and self-traducing. Making clouds shine even if the world’s sun is hidden.

My real-time review here: http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/sangria-in-the-sangraal/

Rare Promise

An amazing serendipity:

An extract from my real-time review of the 'UNBECOMING' collection HERE in March 2009;  the bold is placed on the old text today in March 2012.

(18/3/09 – 4 hours later) Rare Promise - Mike O'Driscoll
Indeed this story holds a rare promise that, even if one tries to surrender its words, they will keep coming back. It is a deeply word-textured Lawrencian symphony of non-urban emotions revealing a bottomless melting-pot of adolescent friendships altered by sex and jealousy, raw or religious guilt and shame, dark almost mythic memories of the “susurrations that slip between sounds”, self versus self through time, the secrecy of imperious fate … and this story does not surrender you the reader not only as a fiction-force-in-itself but because of what has gone before it in this book. In this story, a Confessional that is almost an answering-machine where the demon answerer eventually jumps out at the caller when the ‘conversation’ is abruptly slammed down! The sanctity of silence. The almost Modern Art that this story becomes as a series of blended cuttings of self ‘copy’. The losing of innocence by paradoxically gaining it. Becoming and Unbecoming. I cannot of course do justice to something I fail to absorb completely in one sitting. It may one day teach me to understand when I’m dragged back to it. It will never surrender me finally to the ‘call’ of other books, I’m sure. But – who knows? – it may be the passion of a moment. Only time will tell. The story’s author may jump out of it and drag me back. Not its real head-lease author named on the spine but the story’s demon second-rung author-as-reader calling me to read it all over again so that I can make final penance for not hurting enough the first time. Hurt is only real hurt when it happens time and time again for eternity.
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Extract from my real-time review of 'Wild Justice' edited by Ellen Datlow HERE (March 2012):

Rare Promise – M. M. O’Driscoll

“…sketching in the blanks…” — “His turn to enter the box…” — “Truth hides in a secret place…” — “…but there’s no escape in imagination.” — “engine-foaming sea…”

[This is the only story in 'Wild Justice' that I have read before. Above is my quite lengthy real-time review of this story in March 2009 when I reviewed the whole of Mike O'Driscoll's collection 'Unbecoming' (2006). Mike also has a story in 'Nemonymous One' (2001): arguably about Stephen King's 'accident'. And he has a story in 'The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies' (2011), a story that actually mentions the editor of 'Wild Justice' by name, which I real-time review here.]

My old review of this story above still stands. But I have just re-read ‘Rare Promise’: as well as being a poetic tale of awakening youthful passion and its stifling of earlier memories as yet beyond regression, it echoes the hearing of voices from the previous story. Hearing voices, seeing “voids” or vacuums, ancient leaf-carpeted woodland beds, I infer: a “consecrated ground” where you can’t bury suicides: where memories still fester… It is the coming and going of young Greta, cf: Ings’ Alice. It does indeed sketch in Michael Marshall Smith’s ’blanks’, and other stories’ burials (figurative or literal): another Clegg “flower woman” here close to confessional, the wild justice or catharsis needed for past memories or “a long-forgotten fear”, essentially ‘unforgotten’: the lies of ‘dark spaces’, ‘tight spaces’, the lie of the Cadigan Eye again where you try to hide lies by aphasia or by Oatesian diaspora especially if those lies once started as stated promises: “undermines his few remaining certainties” – a ‘mine’ (belonging to me), for me, as I mentioned in another real-time review recently, being a form of burial of self: and, meanwhile, this story is this book’s lethally ”epiphanic moment”.

Foreign Bodies

Extract from my real-time review HERE.

Foreign Bodies – Michael Marshall Smith
“But half-buried is not enough.”
A lengthy extrapolation on sexual politics between young couples in the mid-nineties – a fascinating period piece in itself when objects were objects, letters letters, books books, and what you did on the computer was word-processing with folders. (I wonder how this story would have panned out with emails.) It also has sharp observations on cigarettes, ladies’ public toilet habits, the default oiling by white lies (cf lies in the Cadigan), manipulators and those manipulated often interchangeable as in Schow and Lethem. But really this story is much much more: adding to this book its own often disturbing and page-turning “ingredients“. A memory’s splinter of glass or ‘diamond dust’, I infer, entering the body’s soul, thus being buried, a life of spasmodic denial. The story’s ”blanking” as another form of burial or denial akin to the earlier relic room, meat safe, burial under sand or garden or (incredibly in the explicit lethal finale of this story) under an actual ”ragged patch of carpet” … and Clegg’s flowers, again explicit as ”dried out flowers“. And Ings’ protagonist’s laconic ‘keeping’ of Alice becomes David’s desperately seeking … who? (14 Mar 12 – two hours later)

A Punch in the Doughnut

Extract from my real-time review HERE.

A Punch in the Doughnut – David J. Schow

“It is said that the first impulse is to share good news; the second, to bludgeon someone with it.”

…and that reminds me of the quote from the Cadigan earlier: “‘Some things won’t go away and some things won’t come back.’ [...] ‘If there were any justice in the world, the two would cancel each other out, or at least balance.’” And those lies again, and whether an Oates marking on a cup is to mark that cup or to mark the other cup that has no marking. This story is so politically incorrect, I hesitate to even review it. I expect the publishers of this book will have been incarcerated since 1996 for publishing this story in the first place. But, taking my life in my hands, here goes… The prose style is a pack of synaptic racers racing inside a just-fired diamond bullet. So much more dead-eyed than a golden one. The two protagonists – I thought perhaps they are wrestlers or prize-fighters who depend on their abiding friendship as a collaborative backdrop to keeping their ‘business’ partnership-as-deadly-enemies in multilple dollars and ‘euro-market crotch grinds’ – but I’m not sure. But one of them gets a bit ’nancy-boy’ and starts yearning after a new friend with a huge dong to be lethally kissed or absorbed elsewhere. But the thing that will always stay with me about this never-to-be-forgotten story is “the Great Despair“: not a sudden shaft of revelation as we might have expected in our respective heydays of youth and aspiration but, rather, a slow-motion jumble in the jungle that accurately predicts – from when it was coined in this 1996 published story - the 2012 world today, with the downward sluggish accretive kindlefest entropy from the Millenium Bug onwards where each of us in our billions will now be needed to extract each apportioned particle of pixellated “diamond dust” that carpets the infinite retina of Cadigan’s aphasic eye: the bloodshot eye with spinning iris that is the internet. Or if not extract, implant. All depends which cup of wild justice you’ve got: marked by bluff or double bluff or neither. (12 Mar 12 – another 2 hours later)

Disarming Strangeness

I like TS Eliot's concept of 'objective correlative'.
But I prefer my own term of 'disarming strangenesses'
I've coined for describing Aickman's objective correlatives.

Cabaret Zoltaire

I woke during the night with a sudden revelation. I recorded it on my real-time review of SECRET EUROPE at the point I had reached, i.e. with 'Cabaret Zoltaire' by Mark Valentine.
Whether or not this is an intentional literary trick, it’s a literary trick that will go down in history!!!!!!
http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/secret-europe-howard-valentine/

The Defeat of Grief

AN EXTRACT FROM MY REAL-TME REVIEW OF 'SECRET EUROPE' HERE

In 2008, I saw this painting by Christian Krohg (1852 -1925) inside the Oslo National Gallery. I wished her better.

A Minor Official - Mark Valentine

“There are some men, I know, who like the wasted beauty of sickly pale creatures: yet — even so. At least, it seems he did not put the portrait in his book. Perhaps it was to be a private pleasure. The point is that a minor official does not indulge his morbid fancies: he resolves to find out how the sickness was caused, how it might be prevented, or at least assuaged.”.

“A Minor Official” is a minor classic.

It had me in tears by the end. Someone so conscientious about his official duties as a water inspector in Herzegovina. A simple good man who has instinctive brainstorming thoughts about ‘emotional’ geography (cf the aural geomancy earlier — here more mood-mapping) as well as his humble-important position or task in optimising the water supply for other simple folk he meets … and the tears came to my eyes when he expressed unqualified confidence in the equal conscientiousness of the postal workers (other minor officials) in ensuring delivery of his letter enclosing a copy of the ’Hydrologer’s Manual’ he had earlier promised to honest people whom he had met during the course of his water duties: despite not knowing the correct address but drawing a map on the envelope instead. I then brainstormed myself. I’m a minor writer, of course. An official of real-time reviewing. I speculated on the mood-mapping of our current Euro debt and currency crises, knowing, as I do, the importance of emotions: the confidence (or lack of confidence) in somehow determining the direction of the markets etc. Not a horsocope of tidal currents, but a conscientious cartography of currencies. A major consideration from a minor pen regarding a Sad Europe? (6 Mar 12 - five hours later)
.

The Way of the Sun – John Howard

“A balcony on the Mediterranean: it had become almost an obsession with him.”

[I had no idea this story was coming up when I chose 'The Last Balcony' page of my website to house this part of my review. Also, the author's own off-piste comment at the bottom of 'The Defeat of Grief' review page here takes on a new significance!] — And after my reference to ‘Sad Europe’ (as opposed to ‘Secret Europe’) at the and of my previous entry about ‘A Minor Official’, things seemed ripe for this story of a sunshine trip, in quest of the balcony, threaded with lucid dreaming. A Defeat of Grief indeed. ‘Mediterranean’ itself – literally – reminds me also of seeking the Earth’s Core of the Nemonymous Night as well as the ultimate balcony, adding a perfectly offsetting tone of oblique dark-lightness,,, yet, we have the Mike Leigh-type (?) married couple, all mouth and trousers, bugging our protagonist, ever turning up with ‘good intentions’ and pointless chatter….not the minor official’s ’emotional’ map as such but a downhill pest-piste. In many ways, I resented them as much as the protagonist did! A story that can swing in this way is surely a masterpiece. [A world without a Bill and Joan would be like a world without the gloom under the aegis of which I collect art gallery painting cards by Munch, Bosch et al.] Or am I swayed by the story’s own insistent bugging obessions as well as by my own? No, it is an exquisitely-styled story, with or without any such connections. Surely set to become an all-time favourite story from the viewpoint of the Lewis head. (7 Mar 12 – 9.20 am gmt
.

Westenstrand

Extract from my review of SECRET EUROPE - here

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Westenstrand – John Howard

“…with effort routes work themselves out.”

[More often than can be warranted by chance, I feel, when I am carrying out two or three real-time reviews simultaneously, as I am now, one story enlightens or synergises, across-books, with another story. Here, remarkably, the tone and plot of 'The Night of His Sister's Engagement' that I reviewed here this afternoon, just before reading 'Westenstrand', has now become even more highly wrought regarding a watery foolhardy challenge to oneself - and, dare I say, vice versa!] – ’Westenrand’ itself is a wonderful account of an island off Denmark – subject to Hitler’s contemporary shenanigans, I sense, that also have bearing on the protagonist’s romance with a woman who frowns on his connections, albeit indirect, with that Dictator - an island (a bit like Mersea Island near where I live in Essex, if the latter is in a much smaller way and with shorter  intervals) that is one minute an island, the next not an island, as subject to the sea’s effects on a causeway. A bit like history. And economics. In both of which disciplines, routes work themselves out, while human bail-outs often falter. (They often milled coins with ‘reeding’ to prevent shaving off their edges.) (4 Mar 12 – another 3 hours later)

Basket of Coinages (updated)

‘zeroism, egnisomicon, egnisism’ in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1967), ‘whofage’ in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1973), ‘agra aska’ (1983), ‘weirdmonger’ (1988), use of ‘brainwright’ in modern times (1990), Salustrade (1992) use of ‘yesterfang’ in modern times (1997), ‘wordhunger’ (1999), ‘nemonymous, ‘nemonymity’, late-labelling, veils-&-piques’ (2001), ‘denemonise’ (2002), ‘megazanthus’, ‘weirdonymous’, ‘chasing the noumenon’ (2003), ‘wordonymous’, ‘wordominous’, ‘the-ominous-imagination’, revelling in vulnerability (2004), ‘a woven fire-wall of words’, ‘the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’, ‘nemoguity’, ‘vexed texture of text’, ‘fictipathy’, ‘nemotion’, ‘the hawler’, ‘the angel megazanthus’, ‘klaxon city’, ‘horrorism’ when used as a word for the philosophy of horror fiction (2005), ‘publication-on-reading’, ‘antipodal angst’, ‘the tenacity of feathers’, ‘a writer’s mandala’, ‘wordy weird’, ‘nemophilia / nemophobia’, ‘magic fiction’ as the obverse of the more common expression ‘magic realism’, ‘weirdtongue’ as the ‘name’ of a language, ‘Glistenberry’ as an alternative name for ‘Glastonbury’, ‘tonguage’ as a ‘conscious’ language, ‘yester-eggs’ as a term for Proustian ‘selves’, ‘the parthenogenesis of reality from artifice’, ‘all is for the pest in the pest of all worlds’, ‘Baffles’ as fables with muffled morals (2006), ‘fanblade fable’, ‘abutting the if’, ‘word clones / word clowns’, ‘bumps for books’, ‘rite of review’, ‘cone zero’, ‘a basket of coinages’ (2007), ‘small press cover ark(ive), the baser pulps’ ‘orrorfaces’, ‘the wheel culture’, ‘netogenic’, the first fiction about a ‘drogulus’, ‘Innerskull’, ‘meganthus‘ (2008), ‘CERN Zoo’ in literature, ‘Real-Time Reviewing‘, ‘ligottum‘, ‘the pit and the pessimum‘, ‘ligottus‘, ‘fubbcuckle’, ‘extraneity creep’, ‘pillowghost’, ‘intowards’, ‘powderghost’, ‘nightmare’s moat’ (2009), ‘THE TENSES’, ‘scream munch’ as another word for ‘captcha’, ‘skight’ – threepenny bit, ‘invitations from within’, ‘novellatory’, ’Ress’, ‘Venn Dreams’, ‘Tearsheet Doll’, scanbuncle, A Götterdämmerung of Guts , Holistic Horror (2010), SFtopia, Salustraders / Overspacers, Novellarette, Inquel, Gaddafery, Jungian autonymity, sudracide, an impesto novel, trendbaffler, our planet as reliquary, fictionatronics, Lovecraftianisation, “To know the worst is also to know the best“, vignellarette, “Nothing is controlled by logic other than logic itself.”, nightgators, Horror Genreators, dicksplay, roman littoral, ghostalt, poltergeistalt, horrasy, Horrasy: The Horrastic and the Heuristic, srednibution, srednidipity, Lovecraftian indescriptivities, bememorise, alephantiasis, reva-menders, metapomorphic, rarifiction, neoloquism, Was the God Particle born instable? (2011), angelivalent, literal-meaning dreaming, the ‘Higgs boson’ of Horror, The Weirdonomicon, Aickmania, shortcomings harnessed are stronger than strengths unused, privacy-trawler. (2012).

The Far Side of the Lake – Steve Rasnic Tem

Real-Time Review continued from HERE

————————————

The Snow People

"Charlie Goode was a great believer in synchronicity."

The next Ghost-Hunter story seems to me to be the natural, yet unpredictable, progression of this book's inter-generationality theme towards an absurdist but - due to this book's 'magic fiction' as opposed to mere 'magic realism' alone - highly believable culmination. Via the imputed cryologies of 'gradual' bereavement and by means of 'passing on' rather than being 'lost' or vanishing altogether during the death process, here the powers let loose by the 'Ice House Pond' give their answer to all Ligottian nihilism by embracing that nihilism: by stitching music from snowflakes: allowing fiction to be our religion, tantamount. Seems to be synchronous with my 'relaxed snowman' photo above that was placed on this site around 5 Feb  before I started reading this book. Do work through the logic of this story together with the foregoing backstories, and you will see, I hope, what I see in this story.  There are some incredible descriptions of those hanging on to death and thus to life - 'playing' in the snow. It is simply a gem of a piece that needs to be read before you are lost or pass on yourself.  Or possibly keep it unread, and you will never die? Meanwhile: "Inside, Charlie found Bobby helping Jimmy dump several boxes of old books and knick-knacks into a large crate labelled TRASH." (15 Feb 11 - two hours later)

THIS REAL-TIME REVIEW IS NOW CONTINUED HERE.

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Ice House Pond

From my real-time review HERE

Ice House Pond - by Steve Rasnic Tem

“More life meant more death.”

A novella-sized tour de force. The male protagonist says the pond is much bigger than it is. A strange statement. [But this ebook is much bigger than it is, too. I had no idea how big when I started it - unlike with a real thick book in your hand as you riffle through its pages assessing its scope. Certainly got my money's worth.] Thus, by means of that ostensibly strange statement, sharing the previous story’s boy’s larger-than-life or imagino-kinetic abilities and whose ‘fog’ trope is now here to be frozen. The male protagonist (who suffers his own past of inter-generational tragedies of wife and daughter in a car accident and more) takes over a desolate ice-property (you have to read this novella to appreciate the enormous stunning scope of that expression, that ’ice-property’ concept in real cold-numbing, cold-abrading, shard-tall grandeur as well as this book’s erstwhile seedy ‘Leaks‘ potential infecting that grandeur, the erstwhile ‘Underground‘ and its ‘hawling’ images, its death-sacrifices to prevent suffering, the purging of past sorrows by creating today greater sorrows or diseases that are paradoxically easier to bear, the Concentration Camp gas ovens [that map-maze with yellowish haze the "mad scientist's" inner earth of my aforementioned 'Nemonymous Night' by dint of its sister novella 'Weirdtongue']; the Ice House’s inner scrying cryological crystal-ball shapes both sickishly mutant and ripe with potential stunning palaces of magic realism (not unlike that sometimes evoked by ’Oscar and Lucinda’ in retrospect) – “…the cold had the presence and intensity of stone” – the ‘genius loci’ of the house, ice pond, ice house that he’s bought, complete with nursery, is via cumulatively powerful prose, or rather an ice-genie-loci? The sun like a huge white eye in the sky reminding me that it is my eye scrying the white screen of this novella (it’s white on my screen). ”Magic ice“. “Ice palaces“. This is Greystone Bay again, now complete with a hinterland of the missing people that the ice has taken and turned into self-redemptive ghosts (your self, not necessarily their selves). An ice house with the scope of a literally global shock, too. Ice block, “love breath” (sharing a bed is important on Valentine’s Day of all days, and I agree with what this novella says so touchingly on this score!). “The oldest cold”. The madness-veined ice-walls. Can memories be frozen like food? (My question, not the novella’s). Fishermen fishing for painted fish (still waiting for something to happen?). Can you tell I’m impressed? Yes, I particularly resonate with the cruel kindness of such fiction. It is replete with traditional stylisms of the Horror fiction genre; it’s as if the artificial world built up cumulatively like an ice sculpture, striking image piled upon striking image with feverous authorial gluttony; it never actually goes over the top because of those genre tropes employed so skilfully, even though it may go over the top for some not accustomed to such literature; and it will melt like all great ice sculptures will inevitably melt as my memory fades with the onset of old age and even my sadnesses will be numbed by the coming ice beyond any melting. Accepting that is like appreciating what makes you accept that. Like this novella. There’s even a bookshop in it with real redolent books waiting to be riffled through. Only global catastrophe will destroy them, I guess. (14 Feb 12 – another 4 hours later)

UNDERGROUND - the story

Excerpt from Real-Time Review

Underground - by Steve Rasnic Tem
A substantial Tem story, without a doubt, and, for me, a personally important one that (like all the stories in this book so far) I’ve just read for the first time. It carries this book’s own internally connected themes plus a pre 9/11 ground zero (or cone zero – see another Nemonymous volume that preceded cern zoo), here a seemingly deliberate building construction hole, with encroaching themes of that hole ineluctably being out of control, and themes concerning explicitly stated statues, ‘tree-men’, travel to ‘earth’s core’, the swimmability within ground or earth [and in my novel 'Nemonymous Night' it is flyability in the earth as well as swimmability! - a novel, for me, felicitously and coincidentally and differently resonating with Tem's 'Underground' as perhaps encapsulated by the concept of what I call 'hawling'] – and the poignancy of ‘difference’, sexual prejudice and many other factors I could enumerate. Here quite brilliantly connected within Poe’s premature burial fear – and a bereft sense or fear of leaving no descendants (note that word!), even too fearful to leave one’s dead body so as to mulch the future? Hence, that bereftness, too, perhaps, when there is no inter-generationality by enforced personal proclivity, i.e. no potential posterity. It’s as if we’ve been led artfully to this point by the previous stories, whereby the meticulously caring among us can now be shown how to care horizontally as well as vertically. You will know what I mean. An intensely caring literature. And so much more, too, like messages not getting through. This one, for me, did. But one needs to read literature with all these moments of meticulous care in their cumulation so as to reach such a point. A ‘hawling’ of emotions to the surface so as to optimise their message, empowering it even further by making readers work hard to ‘hawl’ the meanings free from their clinging roots. But God knows, even optimisation is often not enough. We can only do our best. A story for our times. And for the moving ’dead’ in the Guest House of our soul. (13 Feb 12 – another 90 minutes later)

I have now finished Nemonymous Night. And, on another level, have come to terms with the fact that I have scarcely read it at all.

That is a quote from the book's excellent first review.
One can't dare hope for this book to be read at all, then?

The HA of HA - stock-taking so far

Enthusiastic response since this HORROR ANTHOLOGY OF HORROR ANTHOLOGIES was first published in June 2011.

All reviews linked here: http://horroranthology.wordpress.com/ha-of-ha-reviews/

I have a few copies of the above book – and the one  here - available for anyone who is willing to review either or both. Please contact me at dflewis48@hotmail.com

Aickmania

I've just completed a review of SHRIKE by Quentin S. Crisp started here http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/shrike-quentin-s-crisp/ and finished here http://zencore2007.wordpress.com/111-2/

Contains the first recorded use of the word 'Aickmania' in the comment today on the second link above.

EDIT: Maybe not the first recorded use as someone may have used it before on Googlegroups.